We have officially started the One Year Prayer Experiment!
In the first week, we have already learned some important lessons.
Commitment Requires Adaptability
I started on this experiment with great excitement. Eagerly I planned out my preliminary posts, and I picked November 20th as a start date. As a typical guy however, who has no awareness of birthdates, holidays and anniversaries – I picked the week of Thanksgiving to start my experiment.
The first week of the experiment brought me an important lesson: Be adaptable. A fixed time and place to pray are crucial to creating a habit of prayer. And they help sustain a habit of regular prayer.
But we cannot always control our circumstances.
I cannot always control mine. Our family had plans to go out of town to visit family for Thanksgiving. It was impossible to cancel our plans. I considered pushing back the start date a week, but that is not real life. If we are going to build consistent prayer lives, we are going to have to learn how to pray during vacations and during holidays. So, I kept the start date, packed up the van and departed.
The smart play in this situation is to be proactive. Get the lay of the land. After unpacking the van and sketching out our schedule for the weekend, I knew what times were available and what places were free for me to be in. Knowing this, I picked a new time and place to be my prayer times. I, essentially, went through the process of selecting a consistent time and place that we talked about in a previous post. If it will help, feel free to go to our Prayer Tool Box page and find our PDF guide to picking a place to pray. Print it out and take it with you when you travel.
In my situation, it turned out that early morning was the best time to pray. In a house full of kids, I find it is best to pray before they get up. I set my alarm for 6:30 am. With so many kids in the house, our youngest slept in the room with us. In the mornings he is a light sleeper. The chances of turning off an alarm, getting changed, and getting out without waking him were slim. The place to pray became sitting up in the bed. Normally I would not recommend this, but we must be adaptable right? Part of adapting my prayer times to this new time and place also required a nod to bedtime. To get up early and pray in bed meant that I had to be well rested enough to stay awake. That meant no late nights watching cheesy holiday movies with the family. I made sure I went to bed earlier than I usually do while on vacation.
These adaptations worked. I managed to not miss a day of praying 30 minutes every day over the entire holiday weekend.
Praying For a Full 30 Minutes?
Thirty minutes seems like a long time to pray. Holidays or not.
In our culture thirty minutes is a long time to do anything, much less sit still and quiet. This thirty minutes figure I am sure intimidates many of us. Our understanding of prayer, however, can greatly shape our view of the thirty-minute figure.
Thirty minutes is a long time to pray if all you are doing is making requests. We pray for ourselves first, asking for our needs and desires. Then we pray for our family. Next we make requests for our friends. We check our watch and see only twelve minutes have passed. The rest of the time is then spent trying to think of everyone we have ever known or of every world situation we can think of. That is not fun. That is not relationship building. This is not the experience we are after.
The outline for prayer that Jesus provides for us presents a very different idea of prayer. We talked about Jesus’ teaching on prayer in more detail in an earlier post. To summarize, Jesus taught us that to have a healthy and balanced prayer life, we must include five elements of prayer: praise, justice and unity, requests and thanksgiving, confession, and protection from the enemy.
This is a picture of prayer that is not just asking God for things. It is a picture of talking to God about several different topics in different ways. A give and take. Never having prayed this way, I set out faithfully to give it a try. I hoped the variety offered by this outline would make it easier to last thirty minutes.
What I Found Trying to Pray for Thirty Minutes
To my surprise, I had no trouble making it for thirty minutes. In fact, I found that my timer was usually going off when I was finishing confessing or starting to pray for protection. And this is not because I am a babbler.
I had to think about why this was happening. Then it occurred to me. I was not just making requests, I was not sitting around desperately trying to think of things to ask for. As I had hoped, using Jesus’ outline, I was praying for a variety of things in a variety of ways.
For many, our outline for prayer looks like this:
Make requests :30
Praying like that is hard, and it is not enjoyable. But what I was beginning to experience looked more like this:
Praise :05
Justice & Unity :05
Requests & Thanksgiving :10
Confession :05
Protection :05
Total :30
Thinking of prayer – and the thirty-minute figure – in this way is groundbreaking. This method of prayer breaks that thirty minutes in smaller, more user-friendly pieces. Pieces that are much less intimidating than the big thirty-minute number. I am not recommending you set a series of five minute timers, but I am suggesting we think of our prayer time in this way. It eases the intimidation of such a long time frame, and it unloads the burden of expectation.
Praying this was refreshing, and stretching at the same time.
Being Stretched in Two New Ways
Praying consistently with this new outline stretched me in other ways I did not expect. Two of these components of Jesus’ outline have never been a consistent feature of my prayer times. Adding them to my daily practice of prayer forced me to grow and stretch.
Praying for Justice and Unity
Jesus instructs us how to pray with his Lord’s prayer. In it, he tells us to pray for, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” (Matthew 6:10, ESV) We are to pray that people here do God’s will, that they live the way he wants them to. To put this in a nutshell, we are to pray for justice and unity. Two crucial markers of life in the Kingdom.
I will admit, starting on this prayer experiment, I never have spent much time or effort praying for justice and unity. I have given the practice lip service. In times of great enough social upheaval that it makes the news I prayed for it. When peace and calm returned, these prayers would go by the wayside. I quickly came to realize I had a major gap in my prayer life.
Working my way through the Jesus’ outline for prayer, I came to this portion each day. That moment was like hitting the brakes. Not knowing what else to do, my first attempts came out vague and broad. “Uh, Lord, please take away the injustice in the world.” Well, it’s a start.
So as part of my time of praying for justice and unity, I went to God for help. I admitted I was not doing very well, and asked God to start showing me more specific ways to pray for this. God revealed to me, as the week went on, two ways.
Praying for Justice and Unity: Pray for Peoples’ Eyes
First, God challenged me to pray for people’s eyes. Their spiritual eyes that is. Particularly as Americans, we have trained our eyes to tune out many of the injustices we see around us. We have also trained our minds to dismiss them, to excuse them, or to turn it into an occasion for blame.
So, I was challenged to pray that peoples’ eyes would be opened to the injustices that surround them – my own eyes included. I started to pray that people would start to see how people on earth are not doing God’s will, as they do in heaven.
Only two days later, my son came to me with questions about abortion. If you want to think about a topic that is interwoven with multiple layers of injustice – that is it. And it was great fodder for my time with prayer.
We will see what else God brings to the forefront as we continue our prayer experiment.
Praying for Justice and Unity: Pray for Peoples’ Hearts
God challenged me in a second way to pray for justice and unity. God challenged me to pray for peoples’ hearts. It is one thing for people to start seeing and realizing what goes on in the world around us. It is a totally different thing for them to care. An incident years ago in New York City perfectly illustrates this. A woman was attacked one night. She screamed in the alley repeatedly, but no one came to help. No one even alerted the authorities. During the subsequent investigation, the police interviewed numerous people who lived nearby. Dozens of people reported hearing the screams – but not one of them went to help or called the police. They all knew what was going on, but none of them cared. Or they assumed someone else was doing something about it. Knowledge is not the antidote to apathy.
So, I began to pray that once people began to see what was going on around them, they would be moved. That they would care.
This is clearly not the only way to pray for injustice, but it is a start. And it is encouraging because people who see and who care – become people who act.
If we have trouble praying for justice and unity, start with these two requests. Make sure we pray for our own eyes and hearts – not just those of others. And then pay attention.
Praying for Protection
Praying for protection from temptation and from the enemy were also new ways to pray for me.
In his Screwtape Letters, one of C.S. Lewis’ antagonists describes the two most common errors people make in thinking about spiritual warfare and the activity of the demonic. The first error is to see demonic attack everywhere. Every unfortunate event that happens to us is because we are under attack. If we don’t feel well, it’s because we are under attack. If we are tired, it’s because we are being oppressed. Every single temptation comes from the devil or one of his minions. “The devil made me do it – or at least tried to make me do it” is their slogan.
The other common error is a pendulum swing in the other direction. The error is to completely ignore the reality that there is a spiritual war raging around us. If we are sick, it is because we spent time around sick people. If we are tired, we are tired because we binge watched Netflix all night. Christians in this error do not realize, or acknowledge, that they are involved in a war. Or at the very least, they think they are a safe distance from the front lines, immune from any real danger.
I must confess that while not totally in that category, I lean toward the latter. I will readily grant that a war is going on around us, but I never considered myself an important enough target to worry about any attack. It was easy for me to explain away much of the negative events in my life as being the result of my own choices. Doing so left me with the feeling of some control over my life. If the bad in my life is due to my poor decisions, I can bring good into it by making good decisions. Circumstances were under my control – not the enemy’s.
I also harbored a little fear about getting swallowed up in the whole spiritual warfare thing and drifting into the first category of error. But a balanced and Biblical worldview must prevail. There is a war going on. The forces of the devil do not have free reign to do as they wish, but they do have some powers to attack. Some struggle in life is due to their efforts. Some temptations do come from their lies. There is an enemy, and Jesus says to pray for protection from them.
So, I began to pray for this protection. Like my experiences with praying for justice and unity, my prayers to start with are rather vague and general. They are becoming a little more focused as I practice though. I recognize that I have areas I struggle in. It makes sense then to ask for extra protection from temptation in those areas. I pray for protection for my family. At the end of the week, it still feels a little odd, but I will press on with this.
After my first week of praying for protection, I can’t say I recognize any major changes in regards to spiritual warfare. Many of those more practiced in spiritual warfare warn, however, to expect spiritual attack if you decide to take up arms this battle. We will see. And I will let you know.
A Great Start to the Experiment
The first week of the experiment is in the books. I learned a ton. I am being forced to grow in several different areas at once. And that is exciting.
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